1. USA, National Aeronautics and Space Administration

10 nations that spend the most on space research

Even as India tries to establish contact with Chandrayaan-2’s Vikram Lander, it is evident that ISRO has made huge strides in space exploration.

But all this comes at a cost. India is among the countries with the biggest budgets for their national space agencies.

Here’s a look at countries that spend most on space exploration.

Note: The annual budgets listed are the official budgets for national space agencies available in public domain. The budgets are not normalised to the expenses of space research in different countries, i.e. higher budget does not necessarily mean more activity or better performance in space exploration.

Note also that budget could be used for different projects: e.g. GPS is maintained from the US defence budget, whereas ESA's money is used for developing the European Galileo positioning system. The data for authoritarian countries are unreliable.

Source: www.worldatlas.com, wikipedia, official websites of national space agencies.